1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the production of creative content. More particularly, the present invention relates to computer mediated customization of creative content.
2. Background Art
Much of the appeal of creative content, such as novels, film, television programming, and games, for example, flows from its ability to resonate with the individual life experience of the consumer. To have success in the marketplace in addition to being attractive to individual consumers, moreover, that appeal must be felt in common by the general population of potential consumers. Traditionally, the producers of content have had the luxury of a shared cultural perspective to rely upon when crafting content to be generally appealing. Common social mores, generally recognizable geographic locales, a collective memory of watershed historical events, and perhaps even more importantly, a largely shared consensus regarding interpretation of those events, have assisted content producers to connect with their audience in the past.
The general public to which a content producer must appeal today is a much larger and more polyglot group than that of the past, however. The breadth and diversity of today's public audience is attributable to many factors, two sets of which may be readily identified as having significant implications for potential producers of popular content. One of these is the combination of globalization and the telecommunications revolution of the last two decades, which together have produced a worldwide marketplace for content. As a result, it may no longer be enough for a content producer to provide content having regional or even national appeal. To be major players in the world market for consumer allegiance, content producers must now provide content having global appeal.
Paradoxically, the situation may be even more challenging for content producers targeting a more geographically, culturally and/or ethnically limited general audience. That is because although global market participants may have the resources to compete in the culturally complex and ethnically mixed world market, they may still lack the means to accommodate such diversity of experience and identity. Inconveniently for those content producers attempting to appeal to intra-national, regional, or even local markets, their constituent populations have grown more diverse as well. Thus, not only has the world become smaller as a whole, but local populations have grown less culturally and ethnically homogenous. Consequently, producers of creative content are faced with the challenge of providing content with which a highly diverse audience can at once identify with and connect to.
One conventional approach to meeting the challenges described may be termed the brute force approach, wherein content is produced in multiple distinct versions targeting different groups. The disadvantages associated with that conventional approach include the expense and inefficiency of producing multiple versions of the same fundamental content. In addition, there may be substantial logistical costs associated with generating accurate projections of how much content to produce in which version, as well as timely and effective distribution of the appropriate content version to its target audience. These disadvantages, while significant, may be less acute for large producers of content equipped to compete in a global marketplace than for smaller producers targeting national or regional markets, for which they may present insurmountable obstacles.
Another conventional approach to making content more generally appealing to a broader, more diverse, audience is purposeful genericide of the content. In that approach, content is created around universal human themes, and largely decoupled from any specific cultural context. Those universal human themes are then brought to life and play themselves out in an environment that is intentionally devoid of cultural symbolism. Animation, for example, may lend itself particularly well to such content genericide, even to the point that characters may be rendered only human-like, rather than fully simulating human beings, so that their physical features and expressions defy identification with any one race or ethnicity.
An obvious disadvantage of this latter approach is that it requires a great deal of skill to strike a balance between appealing cultural neutrality and social irrelevance. Moreover, this approach requires the consumer to assume much of the work of interpreting the content, imposing on them the burden of discovering and appreciating the universally themed message, while failing to provide the culturally specific social cues often relied upon to guide intuition.
Accordingly, there is a need to overcome the drawbacks and deficiencies in the art by providing a solution enabling a producer, a distributor and/or an individual consumer to customize creative content so as to render that content relevant to individual life experiences, geography, cultural heritage, ethnicity, iconography, symbolism and the like, regardless of the area of the world in which an audience resides, or the particular cultural or ethnic heritage of the audience.